


Moments Between and Matters of Will

by UnnamedElement (Unnamed_Element)



Series: Writings from Wartime: The Fellowship (Collection) [7]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: And I apparently now also reject fully Sindarin Thranduil too, Elven souls & their bodies & woes, Friendship, Gen, Hurt Legolas, Hurt/Comfort, Sea-longing, Sorry not sorry but I reject Sindarin!Legolas, What a strange hill I have chosen to die on, also, poisoned wounds, unnecessary backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 09:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27968303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unnamed_Element/pseuds/UnnamedElement
Summary: Legolas is mildly injured during the battle at Pelennor fields, but as the next day progresses things are not what they seem. Exhaustion and relief get the better of him, and the very aspects of his elvishness that protected him from poison at the outset may very well be those things that threaten his life in the end.His guard was down and his mind was wandering for the first time since the battle, and his body suddenly found it could no longer defend itself without the stolid will of a stubborn elven mind.Had he been fully awake, Legolas might have recognized the symptoms of a poisoned wound long delayed, but, had he been awake, his mind might also have held the poison unknowingly at bay past the point it would have endangered him at all…And, so, Legolas drifted deeply while his body's hurts unfurled and the wind picked up around him.
Relationships: Aragorn | Estel & Legolas Greenleaf, Gimli (Son of Glóin) & Legolas Greenleaf
Series: Writings from Wartime: The Fellowship (Collection) [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2028670
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	1. After the Battle

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance for the longest Story Note I have ever written in my entire life.
> 
>  **Author's notes:** Have been working heavily on plot for four separate stories and found that I needed a break from all that! (And what better way to procrastinate during finals than writing fanfiction, amiright?) Meanwhile, I have also been re-reading some excellent hurt/comfort fics set during the war, and because I almost always situate my own hurt/comfort firmly within the bounds of plot or character development, I decided I too wanted to torture a beloved character for no reason at all but my own enjoyment! The excellent hurt/comfort stories—admittedly, these h/c have far more plot than my own, but whatever—that inspired me to indulge myself were: [[Hands of the King](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7406140/chapters/16821454)] by Cheekybeak; [[The World Is Changed](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13220615/1/The-World-is-Changed)] by Mirrordance on FFnet; [[Pledge to Duty](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9189300/1/Pledge-to-Duty)] by Anarithilien on FFnet; [[Waiting](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12741324/1/Waiting)] (pre-war) by Dayja; and [[Hands of a Healer](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1789416/1/Hands-of-a-Healer)] by Seeing-Spots. Then there were also two inspiring post-war stories: this very fresh and beautiful and very bookish fic about the sea-longing and finding new paths, [[The Days of the King](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25075348/chapters/60738928)] by Elklights; and then this admittedly depressing but nevertheless stunning and beautifully-written h/c about Legolas, Gimli, and the sea-longing, [[Light Into Grey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27582892)], by Roselightfairy. Please give them a read and some love! _(I never make fic recs. What is happening to me?)_
> 
>  **Notes on where this fits into the "canon" of my other stories (here and on FFnet):** Quite simply, it doesn't. Or at least it doesn't yet. Anything mentioned about the characters in this piece should fit in with what we know about them from those other stories and be considered part of their characterization, but this is "AU" to the rest of my work in that I haven't built this injury into any of Legolas' storyline or subsequent character development at this point. I legitimately just made this up so I could watch Legolas suffer / write sweet Gimli & Legolas friendship / develop my Éomer and his relationship with A and L for later story purposes / try out a new headcanon for Thranduil's backstory in Doriath to see if it makes sense in the context of how I've written Legolas over the years. Unfortunately, only future me knows whether I will write this into another story or not, so for now, who knows.
> 
>  **Nerd note:** I wasted an ungodly amount of time reading the following : (a) reddit threads wherein people argued over whether or not elves are as severely affected by poisons as humans (I learned nothing useful); (b) other nerds on Quora expounding in much appreciated yet quite disturbing detail in regards to how Southern Europeans have poisoned each other with toxin-dipped arrows through the millennia; (c) way too many medical articles, case studies, and wildnerness first responder instructions on Vipera ammodytes envenomation; and (d) a nursing textbook, so I could actually understand what all the stuff I read in point C actually meant.
> 
> I don't know if I've succeeded, but Legolas is an elf and this is fanfiction, so it is what it is. Furthermore, I've made up some things regarding the interaction of the elven body and spirit for the purposes of making elves and their healing a little more believable, so hopefully it is compelling.  
>  **  
>  _Disclaimer:_** _No beta, all mistakes are mine._
> 
> _  
> ___  
> 

* * *

**After the Battle**

* * *

**16 March T.A. 3019**  
**Minas Tirith, Gondor**  
  
Legolas and Gimli had visited with the hobbits in the Houses of Healing, and then agreed to separate for a brief time to see to their own specific needs, for they had labored long the evening before and that very morning on the battlefield, and it was trying physical and emotional work. Gimli had left Legolas perched on an outcropping on the fifth level—gazing across the Pelennor toward Pelargir and the Sea, legs dangling and heels bumping softly against the stone as he hummed—and Gimli himself wandered back up toward the sixth, where Legolas imagined he pressed face to rock, or rooted himself into the ground, those vague and sundry things he thought maybe a dwarf would do when he sought the comfort and reassurance of a mountain.

For his part, he reached his senses outward high and above the suffering that stretched around them, seeking assurances from the sky and the scent of the myriad but scattered grasps of tiny green that sprung here and there in the muted but emerging Spring. He stared across the infinitesimally darkening sky, for so high was Minas Tirith built that from where he sat the world seemed to bend before him at the very edges of his sight, and the colors of it were like gradients of an artist's blue as the sun began slowly to retire for a time. Very far away he could see with tired eyes the glint of its dying silver far away at port, but he forced his eyes to focus closer as a gull swept near him, circling like carrion birds in the aftermath of slaughter, and it pulled his heart. So, he watched instead as a stream of lordly men and elves emerged from a tent on the plains far out and below, where Legolas knew Aragorn and the others to have battened down that afternoon for a council. The stream of men split at the mouth like a river rushed to sea, and they all went separate ways, though he saw the dark heads of Elrond's sons bend off together toward their horses at the right, and the bright head of Éomer and the darker one of Aragorn moved together with purpose toward the city.

Legolas was tired.

It was to be expected—even for an elf—after such a long campaign, but it was still not at all welcomed, for he knew this was but a moment of rest in the drumbeat of war. He had been reinvigorated by meeting Imrahil, and his spirits had lifted on the wings of the hobbits' reassuring updraft when he and Gimli had taken rest with them earlier, but he still felt himself muted. The gulls and their unresolved warnings had worn on him these past days since Pelargir, and he wondered still that he lived after meeting the core of the Lady's warning and surviving to this other side.

But spirit aside, his body was exhausted, too. He had shocked Gimli when they met again after the battle, for Gimli had managed to keep himself oddly pristine, given the intensity of the skirmishes they had thrown themselves into when they charged the field with the rangers and miscellaneous recruits, and with Aragorn's Shadow-men. Legolas knew enough of Gimli to know that the hewing of orc necks could sustain him through nearly any exhaustion and that—despite his lesser height and greater morals—any man aligning himself with Sauron was just another enemy to take out on the backslash. Legolas felt much the same way, but he was unaccustomed to battle on an open field in high sun; was unaccustomed to picking out a spot for long-range weapons on endlessly flat ground, and his knife gave him a much shorter reach than the swords of the men and the orcs who had raged about them.

The enemy had known the end of the battle was upon them when Aragorn's motley army arrived, and Legolas knew from personal experience that sudden knowledge of imminent defeat made one simultaneously more reckless _and_ more dangerous, so he was kept constantly on his toes by the enemy's furor as the spirits of the Dead Men of Dunharrow whirled disorientingly between them. Keeping his head while the cry of gulls spun in his ears from their circling overhead, while he dodged slash after slash and could only attack if he had managed to spin behind an enemy or dive below the sweep of a blade to sink knife into chest… He knew he was lucky the Oathbreakers had been there to quell and quail the hearts of the opposing men—to give him even the _slightest_ advantage—for he was distracted and undertrained for the chaos and confusion of such a particular battle.

Not that he was inexperienced, by any means. He and Gimli had discussed at length their differing approaches to battle in the in-between moments of waiting and boredom and loneliness, those interminable, liminal periods that warriors who often engaged in long-running campaigns were used to entertaining themselves in. They were particularly interested in the differences born of the differing constraints of their homes and their bodies, the unique needs of their people. Gimli, they had discussed, was sturdy and sure in his movements, and he crouched himself low like a lumbering boulder when he cut paths across a field, and he used sudden stops in momentum and the hefty haft of his axe as often as he used his blade—his was the style of a wandering folk, tough and steady whether they had a mountain at their back or a stony road stretched long and unending before them. Legolas' movements, they had decided, were light and fluid, and he held his weight in the balls of his feet; his strength was in avoidance and speed, the language of air and growing things, and it was anchored in a trickery and prediction born not of a connection to rock or soil but of long, hard-wrought experience—his was the style of a people who fought with not just their fellows at their backs but also their trees, and they persevered best under gloam and shadow, weaving invisibly between the light shafts of darkly-filtered beech.

And these differences between them were important at Pelennor.

For in the three thousand years since the Last Alliance, Legolas' folk had only ventured from the eaves of their Wood to battle on but three occasions. Thranduil was more hesitant than even Oropher to engage in those things that did not support firstly the preservation of their people, and while Thranduil was a Sindarin Prince in the annals of history and carried himself thusly, too, due to a childhood and young adulthood rooted and grown firmly in Doriath, he carried also in his blood the _laegrim_ memories of his mother's folk in Ossiriand, of slaughter on an open field, sacrifices that one did not expect to give, the prices paid for slipping from the safety of foothills into battles born of heady greed, until they were just notches in the belt of a war they had never themselves fueled and could not comprehend… Legolas had been alive for only two of those three times his father led their folk out of the protective isolation of velvet trees and wooded dell, and he had only been old enough to participate in one of them (and that was most recently indeed).

His hard-fought and significant skill, therefore, was particularly a warcraft of secrecy, shaped below tree and between rocks, high in canopies—he was a fae ghost at the edge of a woods… It made him perfectly suited for the original task of Frodo's company, but their missions had shifted and their duties realigned such that they eventually found themselves hurtling across floodplains into that seemingly endless chaos—Pelennor was only the second time in Legolas' long life he had found himself in an organized battle on open ground, laid out beneath an open sky, and Gimli was, therefore, the more experienced of the two in such a conflict—his weapons and his style were simply more suited to it. They both knew this, theoretically, and had discussed it even at the outset, but Gimli's heart would not absorb it.

Legolas had not been surprised, therefore, when—after the battle at Pelennor fields—Gimli approached him with no mark at all apart from a bloodied nose and splatters of orchish black across his mail. Gimli, on the other hand, had seemed horrified when he laid eyes upon his elf. Legolas had never seen him move so fast in armor as he did when their gazes met across the expanse of dead and dying men that separated them. Had he not still been overwhelmed with the numbness that often buzzed like cicada in the ears following the intensity of battle, he likely would have found it funny.

In retrospect, of course, it _was_ funny, and Legolas found himself chuckling even then as he swung his legs absently and watched Aragorn and Éomer finally cross through the dark gates of Minas Tirith, to disappear into the crowds far below. He smiled as he remembered how Gimli's helm had bounced excessively as if buoyed by his generously-cushioning hair, and his heavy boots thumped and flapped beneath him—Gimli's beard flew as he ran and it puffed mightily when he came even with him, vibrating with each breath when he took him by the arms and shook soundly, glaring up into his own tired and downturned face.

Legolas was lucky, he knew—given the affected state in which he had fought—that he had emerged with only two simple slashes and an arrow wound to his favored arm, which had passed nearly straight through and, ultimately, gave him little more pause than the time it had taken him to jab it through the rest of the way, so he could lift his arm again without the sharp metal catching and cutting at the muscles within. He had registered the hurt, distantly, but that was just the way of war—if one could focus on survival instead of the pain of minor hurts, one could force the body to persevere when, at any other time, such hurt might drop you to your knees and leave you gasping. It could have been worse, he knew, and the unfortunate inattention that had danced about him since Pelargir—like an obnoxious suitor you did not want to engage but could not ignore no matter how hard you tried—had cost him, and it would hopefully serve as a reminder for him to not let it do so again.

Still, all the battles Gimli had seen Legolas in before the Pelennor had been skirmishes cradled by the boughs of trees, battles fought with wall or chasm or river at their backs, and he had been able to navigate even Helm's Deep as he might a forest. For all the crushing pressure of bodies and noise, it was similar enough to serve his purpose. Gimli had seen him come out of those battles with nothing more than an ugly bruise, a small cut, a temporary reduction in range of movement that came from overextending one's limbs or pushing back hard against weapons much heavier than one's own. Gimli had struggled more in those enclosed spaces than Legolas, and then the tables had turned…

For all the humor he saw in Gimli's reaction now that Gimli had been assured he was well, it had not been humorous then, for when Gimli took him at the arms and yanked him down to his knees so they might look eye-to-eye, he knew he must have looked a sight. Gimli spoke and patted his cheeks, had taken his chin between strong fingers and pinched, but Legolas had not been able to understand a single word he said. His ears had been still filled, then, with the cicada-buzz of adrenaline, and his eyes slipped from Gimli's worrying face to the sky, where he finally allowed the ever-present circling of the gull's cold cry to take him fully for a moment, to rock him—

It was not until Gimli had slapped him soundly and shaken him again that he came back into himself with a resounding jolt, and suddenly the pain of the arrow wound rushed into his mind like a spider-reared and striking, and he huffed and gritted his teeth and looked to his friend with a forced smile. He remembered reassuring Gimli he was fine, asking for water and for assistance, and then offering a jest about the sturdiness of stone-carven dwarves before allowing himself to collapse gently onto the ground, with a chuckle and a curse and a muted gasp.

Gimli had not been as amused by his cavalier attitude as he, but they had taken care of the wounds quickly enough—with only a handful of stitches and a smattering of medicine—and the next morning found Legolas alone outside their tent, pre-dawn, patching the rips in his bloodied clothes as best he could. He had hunched over needle and thread in the chilled morning light as the battlefield-turned-camp woke slowly about him.

And now it was evening, and here he sat—on the fifth level of the city—nearly whole again, clad in clothes gifted him by the Sons of Elrond and a ranger boy, for he had quite given up on repairing the slash to his overshirt and trousers once he realized there was simply not enough cloth left with which to repair them. The ranger lad's shirt was too short on his arms, and Elrohir's trousers _quite_ too long, but he had not been raised to scoff at things graciously and freely given, and he had not fancied walking about in smallclothes or drowning himself in the folds of Éomer 's heavy-knit overshirt, which had _also_ been immediately offered when the horselord had passed him and witnessed the very sorry state of Legolas' jacket…

That being said, he had been fighting a strange and creeping cold, now, all day—one he had not felt in years, and that he usually associated with blood loss, spider bites, and gaping wounds, none of which he suffered—so perhaps the Rohirric knit _would_ have been preferable to the boy's linen shift. But the deed was done, and at least he did not look like a child playing at war in his father's clothes, as he would have looked in Éomer's shirt, for Éomer was far broader across than he. Even as surprised as he had been by the injuries he had taken, he was attempting to maintain some degree of respectability in his bearing, for he felt quite alone and at sea among these throngs of brilliantly-burning mortals. He hid his chill well enough, though, and had managed to make the shortness of the boy's sleeves less comical by binding them tight beneath his wristguards.

The sun was dipping rapidly now and the temperature fell with it, and he wondered vaguely where Gimli had gone to, and whether he would come seek him where he had left him, so they could go in search of food and fire before reuniting with Aragorn at some point in the later night. He shifted so he was leaned flat against the stone of the wall instead of sat forward with dangling legs, for the angle of the wall and the small lip that protruded from its edge was enough to cut the effects of the wind that seemed now to rise in direct opposition to the sun's speeding retreat.

He shivered and frowned and dropped his gaze to the circles of city below him—it hummed with activity even as the night encroached. Lights and torches quickly flared in its darkest areas, and they spread outward from those points like stars flung wide at the dawn of time, until the whole place glowed flickering gold as the heavens sprawled spattered and silver above them. He wondered vaguely where Éomer and Aragorn had disappeared to once they entered this city of stone, and he rubbed a hand across his forehead and flicked off a sheen of sweat he had barely noticed and did not bother to consider.

Legolas sat, and he watched, and time slipped by him like a creek round a rock in a rainstorm—he felt vaguely his body and the energy that rose about him, but his eyes eventually glazed and he thought of other times and other battles, other places and other _people_ —his sister chasing him round a bend and through a tunnel of laurel in a childhood long gone by; his father's hard hands that lifted him urgently from bed when he fell sick with poisoned fever, the golden embroidery he had studied as he bounced unfeelingly in his father's arms down the twisting corridors of their home; the baker's impressed gasp when he pulled his first well-formed loaf from the oven, his own heart bursting with pride; the brush of a hand against his in moments of doubt, eyes that met, and melted, laughing…

As he wandered his dreamscapes, his body sank farther into the stone until he almost slept, ignorant of the chill spreading further and deeper from fingers and toes to limb and leg; to the hand scratching absently at the stitches on forearm beneath borrowed shirt, that itched now and bled as they were pulled at and they stretched, for his upper arm swelled in a radiating expanse from the erstwhile harmless arrow wound—

His guard was down and his mind was wandering for the first time since the battle, and his body suddenly found it could no longer defend itself without the stolid will of a stubborn elven mind.

Had he been fully awake, Legolas might have recognized the symptoms of a poisoned wound long delayed, but, had he been awake, his mind might also have held the poison unknowingly at bay past the point it would have endangered him at all…

And, so, Legolas drifted deeply while his body's hurts unfurled and the wind picked up around him.

He had passed fully from elven wandering to a truer sleep by the time Gimli reappeared some time later, with a reluctant Aragorn and a reserved but eager Éomer at his heels, for the dwarf had insisted they all take together a meal to promote some non-diplomatic camaraderie. But Legolas slept, unknowing, and the arrow hole pulsed with the fervor of a wound unstoppered, and his arm was made wet with blood so warm it would have shocked his cooled skin had he been aware. And he slept so deeply, too, that even Gimli's cry of despair did not rouse him, and he did not stir as the dwarf ran toward his perch on the wall and stared up at the hand that dangled now toward the grass, blood dripping steadily from fingers like a branch warming at winter's end, snow and ice spiraling from its tips with the softest of steady patters to the leaf mould below—

Legolas did not see Aragorn gently move Gimli aside, nor did he see him reaching arms upward to assess him best he could—given the awkwardly high place he had tucked himself in before he fell asleep—nor did he see Éomer provide Aragorn a leg up so he could reach. He did not feel as he was tugged gently into Aragorn's arms, and he was not aware of the solid reassurance of Gimli's heavy hands as he was carefully maneuvered from stone to basketed arms to clumping moss and stone again.

In fact, Legolas did not so much as twitch until the nascent grass was crushed beneath him and its tiny, recently-awoken vigor rushed past his ears like a chorus of eager spring-peepers. He blinked and opened his eyes to find Gimli leant above him. Éomer's hands were busy at his vambraces, and Aragorn's rough palm pressed firmly at his brow.

He was deeply cold and his arm was wet, and his whole self pulsed with each beat of his heart. The stars were far away and he suddenly shivered, and it was such a strange sensation that it found him waking fully, such that he focused on Gimli's face as the dwarf spoke to him in a steady and calm tone, but his ears could not keep up with the words and he felt himself frown and try to sit up—

He did not understand what was happening. The world spun around him, and he was disallowed from movement by Aragorn's gentle hand on his head. His senses were disconnected from his mind as he was shifted about and moved on the rocky, sparse floor, and his arm and the side it pressed against were so wet now with the burning warmth of his blood that he would have turned his head to stare in shock had Aragorn's hands not pressed then hard on either side of his face, thumbs massaging at his temples as he body began to truly shake—

Westron fell about him like rain, and it washed over his ears without a snare of comprehension, which only served to heighten what he realized now was a mounting and cresting anxiety—it had been _years_ since this language had left him completely reeling, _centuries_ since he had been buffeted in its tides without any understanding at all—

 _It was only an arrow!_ was the thoughthis mind had the strength to cobble together as his body betrayed him further, for try as he might it was too far gone to force back into submission by strength of will and thought alone—

He vaguely recognized that Gimli was holding him close as Éomer cut up the sleeve of the gifted shirt. The cold of the night pressed onto him, then, with a heaviness so sudden and shocking that even the warmth of his own blood no longer protected him—

_It seems it was more than an arrow, Legolas._

And his eyes snapped fast as they could to that voice who spoke now in Sindarin, that cut through the fog of his ears to resonate in his mind, and he wondered then if he had actually spoken the thought aloud…

Aragorn's grey eyes were calm and reassuring, but Legolas was scared for the first time in a long time, for the first time in years, for the first time since he was last felled by a careless mistake beneath his wood's darkened trees, overlooked in the aftermath of battle, accidentally left behind, alone—

His arm was yanked and tied tight below the shoulder, and he was lifted. His face pressed into the heavy-knit of the very jacket that had been offered him just that morning, and he found himself trying to force words past chattering teeth, to cry out in any language he could manage at all how sorry he was for staining it carmine, when it had been such a lovely blue, subtle and pale as the last bloom of chicory in Fall—

But the only thing that made it past his lips was a starburst of Sindarin which—as his head lolled and he watched Aragorn's brows crease in concern before he forged with speed ahead of them—he vaguely understood was probably not even Sindarin at all…

Gimli's heavy hand brushed at his ankle as his eyes slipped away and far into the past—his mother's voice of an evening, instructing him in weaving, soft and lilting, tripping the paths of a woodland tongue that he held so dear, so well; songs round a fire with friends at night; arguments about dialect between comrades whose families nurtured so proudly their distinct and complex stories; his brother instructing him in Sindarin while speaking in Nandorin, a quill pressed into small hands as he leant over vellum in the library and dipped into ink for the very first time—

But then high above there was a gull, and he was ripped from the memory of his brother and kin, and the sound drowned out those comforting thoughts of a faraway land—

 _Ah!_ Legolas thought vaguely, as he forced his head to turn and press instead, for comfort, into Éomer's quickly-darkening shirt. _And so I have not escaped the warning yet!_

Far out over the Pelennor, the gulls cried again, cold and far behind, as they followed Aragorn from wall to street and through the gate to the sixth level's halls as quickly as Éomer could safely run—

 _Is_ this _the danger she foretold?_

But then the cry suffused his ears and he was drowning and was burned. His mind flew wide and his lids dropped low, and the world faded to glass around him.


	2. In the Houses of Healing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is quite a long chapter, and it plays hard and fast with some of the concepts laid out by Tolkien in LACE and HOME, in regards to (a) the nature and drive of the elven body and soul and (b) Gandalf and his roles. For those who are interested, I will furnish references and quotes at the end of the story. This is my interpretation, obviously, and not canon. (Yay, fanfiction!) Also I have made up all these poisons, though they are based in reality. Finally, you will notice Gandalf is referred to as Mithrandir and, finally, Olorin in this chapter, while still remaining the same fellow. I hope this chapter works and I apologize for the length! Thank you for taking the time to read and indulging in this story with me.

* * *

**In the Houses of Healing**

* * *

Aragorn entered the Halls of Healing as quietly as he could given the relative lateness of the night and the urgency of the situation, but he quickly abandoned decorum and called to an apprentice healer passing by, demanding the presence of Ioreth. The adolescent nearly dropped the basket she had been carrying—for she immediately recognized the man Lord Faramir had named _king_ just the night before—but she recovered with a nod and flew round the corner toward where the old woman sat often at work, grinding herbs into powders for poultices and packing.

Aragorn turned when he heard Éomer and Gimli's heavy footfalls beating down the cobblestone. He considered running out to meet them, but decided that steady hands and an even breath were more important to preserve than laying eyes on Legolas more quickly.

Before, as he had pounded his way up the levels, he had reviewed in his mind every interaction he had had with the elf since disembarking the ships, and he had examined every flash of him he had observed from the corner of his eye earlier in the day. And so, as he stood then and waited the handful of seconds before Éomer and Gimli came into view, he breathed deeply to root himself, and he forced his mind into motion, settling deep—he compared Legolas' behaviors the past day with what he had gathered from the elf himself, when they had shared a cup of tea midmorning, about his wounds; and his mind rushed through his catalogues of memory, sorting through herbs and lore and all those things he had studied when Elrond was his guide—

But the cogs of the machine crunched to a stop when Éomer emerged from the night and heaved into the room, and his heart fell once more at the sight of the elf clutched close to the horsemaster's chest—his companion-turned-friend who normally stood straight and calm beside him, who followed him ever, as if he had been born into the role and were not just carefully selected for it, plucked abruptly from his home to fill the needs of a journey doomed... Aragorn met Gimli's eyes as the dwarf jogged up alongside them, but the dread intensified when they beheld one another, and Gimli turned away and focused intently, instead, on the limp and lanky legs that jerked right at his eyeline, the dark stain that crept up the woven blue of Éomer's jacket like an unintentional, regretful splash of dye on an otherwise well-crafted thing—

It was unnatural. All of it.

As they got close enough for Aragorn to grasp Éomer's shoulder, he still did not know what was wrong, but it was clear now, this close, that Legolas was fully unconscious. Aragorn pulled Éomer firmly and gestured for Gimli to follow, and he rushed them to the corner of the room nearest an herb cabinet. There were several high tables for working on men, and Éomer laid Legolas gently down, before wiping his palms clean, of the elf's sweat and blood, on his shirt. He seemed to consider for a moment—arms held out awkwardly from his sides—before stripping off the ruined cloth and dropping it to the floor. When he nudged it out of the way with the toe of his boot, he felt the heaviness of its blood catch at the stones, and he glanced down to see a deep splotch darkened and rusty in the center of his undershirt, and when he looked up, he saw that Gimli stared, too.

Aragorn grimaced, and reached out to pull strands of sweat-wet hair from the elf's face, before moving to cut the rest of the too-small tunic from arms and chest. He pressed fingers to the unaffected wrist as Éomer took the shredded shirt in his hands.

"Ai—" The sound of concern passed Aragorn's lips before he could stop himself, for Legolas was not only pale and lusterless but cool to the touch, muted beneath the normally tawny tone of his ever-warm skin. It was as if the blood had fled the surface for the safety of his chest, as if it centered deep down to keep the lungs expanding, to power the beating of a weakened heart—which, Aragorn admitted, as he shifted attention from wrist to press at the soft skin under neck—to catch better at the beat of a far-too-speeding heart—it probably did…

"This is utterly unnatural for an elf."

He noted the quickening of breaths at Legolas' chest as he lifted his fingers—the vein pulsed bird-fast and too soft—and he bit his lip. He pressed, then, flat to the blood-sticked chest and clammy brow, and spoke softly his name, but there was no answer. Aragorn sunk further into himself as he pressed energy out as far as he could—down arms, through fingers, toward Legolas' heart and mind—but he could not reach him. There was a wall like tightly-knit ivy that shook and writhed between them, and Aragorn was rebuffed.

He withdrew and wiped a hand down his face. He shook nervous energy from his hands as Ioreth rounded the corner and appeared in response to his summons. She pushed past Éomer and between Gimli, absently informing them that she had sent the girl for hot water and bandages.

The bleeding had slowed, by then, thanks to Gimli's use of his belt at the armpit, but it cut into Legolas as the arm continued to swell. Dark red tendrils struck out like forked lightning from the hole—which seemed to Gimli to have deepened since he had last seen it—and Aragorn helped Ioreth to turn him on his side so she could see the back. The same tendrils followed the uncharacteristically visible veins around the exit wound as they did on the front.

Ioreth frowned and supported the arm as Aragorn lowered him again, and Legolas did not react, though his head rolled toward them so Gimli was face to face with unfocused eyes. Aragorn glanced over as a strangled sound was ripped from the dwarf, and he watched Gimli press a hand to Legolas' head, brushing at the wild hair that fled the strands of the braid knit down his back; he brushed it away from his face in a rhythm Aragorn recognized as one more for the soother than the soothed…

It had been nearly half a minute since they had turned him, and Aragorn realized, disconcertingly, that this was the longest he had ever heard Ioreth be quiet, and that was concerning.

"I do not know what ails him," Aragorn finally said into the silence. "I saw him at noon and he was gay and effusive as ever—waxing on about the clouds— though perhaps more tired than I have ever seen. I do not know what poison this is—it is certainly not the same that tried to take Faramir yestereve…"

Ioreth was frowning as she pressed a hand over the wound and loosened the belt as much as she dared, so the limb wound not sicken and the skin would not split. "When did he take this wound?"

"At the battle," Aragorn answered immediately, but she was shaking her head, and both Aragorn and Gimli watched her intently.

"Exactly when? The battle ended a full day ago now."

Gimli stopped stroking the tangled hair to respond. "Last night, my lady, in the last hour or so of the fighting."

Ioreth stepped away from Legolas and shook her head, and then she frowned up at Aragorn. "Then it cannot be what I thought, my Lord, when I first walked in and saw him, for had he been stricken by _that_ he would be dead, by now—without the antidote—three times over!"

Éomer moved forward, as well, and touched the skin—shocked—at the shoulder, for as the three others had conversed, he had watched, disbelievingly, as a bruise suddenly spread like spilled wine from the belt above the wound, to the elf's upper arm, and on toward the top of his chest. As Éomer laid a hand on the cold skin, several more splotches bloomed red and isolated around it, and his mind was drawn to a time long past, when he and Éowyn and Théodred had clambered in play up a pile of rocks their fathers had dug from farmland the summer before—they had come suddenly upon a villager at the bottom of the pile, whimpering and clutching his leg. They were young and small and could do nothing at all but send Éowyn back to the Meduseld, running as fast as her little legs could run, while the man writhed in pain and choked on vomit until blood bloomed bruises like perverse roses across his body, his breathing stuttering and stilled—

He swallowed.

"We have a serpent in Rohan, a rock asp," he offered. "I saw a man, once, who looked like this, many years ago, but it was different…" He trailed off and looked away. "This blood…"

Ioreth moved to the herb cupboard and spoke from within it, voice muffled as she rummaged about— "Yes, I thought it to be Gorgorothrin viper toxin when I first laid eyes on him."

She emerged from the cupboard with a jar filled with a greenish tincture in one hand and a grasp of shepherd's purse, a tightly bound pack of sage, and a tin of arnica in the other. Aragorn pulled his hand away from where he had been bent forward, palpating the oddly spreading bruises as Éomer spoke. He frowned in confusion for, as he watched, it seemed to recede momentarily like waves lapped at the shore before darkening again and moving forward in a rush—as if pushed and pulled by some tide, almost as if Legolas' body fought to heal itself as rapidly as it could even as it failed him...

Ioreth poured a dose of the tincture, and the scent of evergreen and yarrow burst into the air. "That is what all the causalities suffered when they were first brought in, late last night and even this early morn. The Haradrim and the orcs of Mordor dip their arrows in its venom. We have had an antidote for it for years now, and a better one than that which we used for the Lord Faramir's poison, mind."

She glanced at the oddly purpling and paling bruise as she nudged Aragorn and frowned. "But I have never seen _that_ before…"

Aragorn sighed, for while he was accustomed to the strangeness of elven healing, _he_ had never seen anything quite like that either... He felt Gimli shift close beside him, and glanced down to see thick fingers grasp at the pulse point on the elf's thin wrist, as if he might tie Legolas to this life with nothing more than his sturdy, stony stubbornness alone.

"And by midmorning," Ioreth continued, "no living man came to me with a poisoned wound, for it will run its course if left untreated, within half a day, for most. The devils make it concentrated, such that a poisoned arrow wound is several times worse than a bite by itself."

Aragorn thought as hard as he could on all the lore Elrond had ever poured into his head over the years; he thought back through every case he had ever seen of poisoning in elves… But none looked like this.

Gimli cried out in despair, and Aragorn whipped round to see where Gimli pointed—the length of the elf's affected arm had darkened to mauve, purpling out from the centerline as the wounds started to bleed and the vessels bruised from within—

"So, it cannot be that," Ioreth murmured, and she shoved the minty tincture she had just poured at Éomer, lifting the bruised and bleeding arm to swiftly cut the stitches on Legolas' forearm so the swelling would not tear the skin further. "Not if he was injured here last night and was fine all day since. How long has he been insensate?"

Aragorn did not answer, for he was looking around the room for anything that might spark a memory, but he heard Gimli speak, explaining what time he had left him and how he had awakened for a moment when they found him, before falling away into this. Aragorn crossed to the other side of the table and stared at the elf, willing his brain to make some connection, round some corner, weave through the trees in the knowledge of his mind, push through some hitherto unexplored door, where a connection and an answer might hide crouched behind, for the elf fell more grey by the second...

While Legolas had not moved once since being laid on the table those few minutes ago, his head twitched suddenly to the side as if trying to rouse himself, and Aragorn watched with fearful hope as the elf's breathing stuttered and he struggled to deepen his breaths, fighting toward consciousness—his brow was suddenly tight with a pain it had not shown before. The elf blinked rapidly and twitched his hand as he woke, and if it had not been so dire a circumstance Aragorn might have smiled to see Gimli jump as he did, for the dwarf had been murmuring to himself in Khuzdul, eyes closed and head bowed. Legolas' questing hand grasped at the dwarf's wrist. He was marginally aware, now, but hardly lucid, and Gimli moved himself closer and pressed a hand to his head.

"Help me to sit him up, my lord," Ioreth finally said, and she rounded the table. "For there is something wrong with his breathing and he needs that tincture," she nodded at the glass in Éomer's hand, "if there is any hope of stopping this bleeding at all, and that's always the thing to kill them."

Aragorn was not accustomed to being ordered about in matters of healing, but he _had_ become accustomed to Ioreth quickly enough, so he shifted and slid his arms beneath Legolas' shoulders and hefted him gently forward, Ioreth laying a hand at his arm to guide him. As they lifted, the elf's head dipped low in disorientation and he blinked rapidly as if fighting a current, but then he was dragged away again beneath the surface, and was still.

As Éomer handed Ioreth the medicine, she started chattering again, as if there had not been a gap in the conversation at all, and as if each of her companions' minds had been busy all that time considered the impossibility of Gorgorothrin wound poisoning. And so she continued thusly: "But I don't know what else it might be, if not that, for a poisoned wound this obviously _is_ , but it is no Black Breath, either."

Éomer took Aragorn's place in holding Legolas upright as Ioreth tilted the elf's chin and Aragorn took up the swollen hand to send focused energy as gently as he could as they prepared him for the tincture.

"Honestly," Ioreth continued, and she lifted the cup to Legolas' lips as Gimli patted his cheek and whispered in an attempt to rouse him, "the only creature I have _ever_ seen survive venom of _any_ kind so long as this one was a damned _frog_ —men are simply not built to resist it."

And then Aragorn started and grasped Ioreth hard at the wrist—"But, my lady, Legolas is _not_ a Man!"

Ioreth lowered the cup from where it pressed at Legolas' lips and she stared at Aragorn—perhaps she thought for a moment that Legolas was some particularly strange shieldmaiden of Rohan? But no, for he watched her consider with new eyes the smooth expanse of the youthful face, watched as she nudged sweat-wet hair at his temple until the tip of an ear emerged—

"Huh," she said suddenly, stepping back. "I suppose he is not. It would explain why he has not died yet, but _not_ why he bleeds now like a pig and is sick as a dog…" She handed the cup absently to Aragorn and gestured toward Legolas as she swept from the room, muttering to herself in her hurry.

Aragorn tipped a portion of the tincture into the elf's mouth, and he and Gimli worked patiently as Éomer held him up beneath the arms until enough had trickled down the throat to be effective. Aragorn felt his own mind drifting away from the room and the table, and he returned again to the catalogue of lore through which he had earlier raked, and it still laid useless before him, open but empty. There were no hidden doors, no unturned sheafs—there was nothing much left to do with this thinking, and he felt himself falling fast in despair, for before him lay Legolas, and outside the walls lay Halbarad, and was he not one of the Three Hunters who had heard the words of the Lady all those weeks ago, and yet he had led Legolas, still, to the Sea?

So he let himself go into the tide of the room, anxious and adrift—he did not know what this was. He did not know whether to focus on the hurts of the body and Legolas' failing blood, or on the unnamed elven malady that seemed to have subverted the body's basic ability to heal, because if one worsened the other and there was nothing to be done?—

Ioreth came back in then, with another apprentice hauling a bucket of water behind her, and Aragorn felt himself swept up around her like a leaf to a stone in slow water, orbiting closely, bumping up against the tension... He frowned awfully as Éomer helped him to lay Legolas down again; and his hand drifted unconsciously to play with the stone at his throat…

Ioreth began to wipe down the elf's arms and chest with the lukewarm water. "Can you do nothing for him," she asked gently, with a glance, "with your healing hands, Lord?"

Aragorn shook his head and ran a hand in frustration over his face, and he felt himself use his heart to push his mind further away, so he was no longer quite connected with the scene at all.

"I have done what—incredibly _little_ —I can in that sense, but I do not know that this is even a matter of will… I suppose the poison caught him by surprise, at rest, and that it—having been so long since he was shot? A day now?—perhaps it has beaten him down."

He shook his head, and watched Legolas shift slightly of his own accord, reacting to the scratch of soft fabric at his wounds. He twitched and turned his head away from Ioreth.

"He reacts now," Aragorn murmured. "And, verily, I felt how he fights mightily inside, but his mind rebuffed me so soundly when I tried to guide him that I fear the body has subsumed the will to live, though I cannot understand how…"

Gimli took the bloodied cloth handed him by Ioreth as he spoke. "The lords Elladan and Elrohir, Aragorn." And then he passed the healer a clean rag, swallowing and averting his eyes as he dropped the one stained carmine atop Éomer's discarded shirt. He looked at Aragorn imploringly and then: "Might they help?"

"Perhaps, yes," Aragorn said, "for they have powerful blood from high elves of old, and much training from their father, besides… But they are far out on the plains, by now, scouting for troops that straggle or linger, that may attack overnight, and so they are of no use now…"

"And what of Gandalf?" Éomer said quickly, remembering how the wizard had sat at Aragorn's side and provided support as the king-returned worked over his sister, and over Faramir, and the hobbit.

"I have no idea where he is, but I shall send runners out through the city," he whispered quietly. "If you can spare the pages, my lady," he amended, glancing at Ioreth, who immediately nodded, called for an assistant, and continued her work without pause.

She had moved from the cleaning and was busy, now, stuffing the poisoned and swollen wound with yarrow, cobweb, and sage, and she wiped a hand across her brow as she gestured at the apprentice hovering nearby to bring her a heavy bottle. She uncorked it and poured it liberally over the packed wound—it smelled strongly of spirits and mint and pine—and Gimli stepped forward with a cloth for the healer, eyes burning, as Legolas jerked in response and the alcohol ran in rivers down his arm. Ioreth padded the wound with more cobweb; sealed it with a dollop of honey; and pressed a small pad against it, before loosening the belt at his shoulder just a bit more.

She studied the middling effects of her work with a grimace.

Aragorn had just begun to search for the page for whom Ioreth had yelled when a voice came suddenly from behind—

"There is no need to send for me, Aragorn." And there was a sweep of robes and the stirring of air. "I am come." And Gandalf seemed to cross the room to them, then, in just two strides, until he stood suddenly close.

"How—" Gimli began, but Gandalf shook his head and tossed the leathers he had been clutching onto a low table against the far wall. They were Legolas' bracers, bloodied and loose from when Éomer had ripped rapidly at their cords so they could reach his arm.

"Lucky for Legolas, he is fool enough to leave his things lying about—"

"How, with all the—"

"— _and_ fool enough to have had the symbols of his parents' houses tooled into his armor," he murmured, answering the question unasked and brushing past them all to lean over the elf. "The boy must be homesick."

He ran hands over Legolas, sweeping above the swollen and preliminarily-wrapped arm, across the shallowly huffing chest, where he hovered for a moment over heart, before drifting up toward his head.

As Gandalf stood silent—eyes closed in concentration—no one dared to speak.

Finally, the wizard pulled back with a hum and glanced at Aragorn. "I have not seen something _quite_ like this, but I think I know what ails him. If I am right, and we act quickly, he may be well enough come morning."

Ioreth made a noise in her throat as if she considered arguing against such folly, and Aragorn looked skeptical, and frowned.

Gandalf ignored them both, and Gimli stirred beside Éomer at the head of the table as the wizard continued: "But we must rouse him enough so that he might understand me, otherwise he shall fight us all the way and lose himself quicker than we otherwise might."

"But I was just preparing to give him—"

"You do not have to _understand_ this, Lady Ioreth," Gandalf said firmly, "or agree with me, at all. But you _do_ have to do as I say. I know well the Children of Eru, and I have known _this_ particular fool since he came of age—a good millennia ago now—and I know how his soul sings, and the ways it is woven through his body… And so I can tell you, Ioreth—without hesitation—that an antidote now will be rejected more fiercely than almost anything else. Besides," and he looked up to meet her eyes with a brief flicker of softness, "have you not seen stranger things this past day than an old man giving counsel in regards to an elf?"

For all her great knowledge and herblore, Ioreth flushed, for this was beyond her, she knew, and she felt Aragorn chastised, too.

"Gimli," Gandalf said then, suddenly, and he cupped Legolas' cheek and turned slightly toward the dwarf— "When I tell you to, we will try to wake him."

Gimli seemed momentarily surprised, but he nodded and cleaned his hands on his shirt as he moved closer to Gandalf to peer at his friend. He considered his elf, and his heavy brow knit tight in thought for a few long seconds, after which he dashed from the table and round the corner, dragging an apprentice with him through a connecting door.

"It is not your fault, Aragorn," Gandalf said distractedly, without looking up, ignoring Gimli's behavior entirely. "It was Legolas' choice what to do with the words of the Lady. This hurt is beyond even the skills of you, Elessar, though glad I will be of your assistance when I have got him back." He cut eyes up to Aragorn and then back down to the elf, whose lips were greyed to a muted periwinkle, and he continued succinctly— "I am telling you this, Aragorn, because I will need your _presence_ , and your _focus_ to the task at hand."

Aragorn nodded and let his hands fall loose at his sides.

Gandalf was tucking hair, now, back from Legolas' face, brushing away the sweat that pooled at the bow of charcoaled lips. He let a finger hover above the bruises that crept from arm and chest to shoulder and neck, and—there!— the first one purpling his jaw, darkened and dying outward from a scratch he had received the afternoon before, when he had been scraped by a foe's heavy armor.

Gandalf looked around for Gimli, and spoke to fill the tense silence: "This nonsense you see, Ioreth, is the strength of the Elves, but also their greatest weakness—control of body by soul, though here it has been perverted—"

"But it does not make sense!" Aragorn interrupted abruptly, for Gandalf's earlier words had settled him as sure as stone back inside himself, and his mind was once more the machine he so valued. "He is not so old that his soul should have faltered; there should have been no way…" He paused. "So, it was the Sea itself, then, and not the gulls? This thing that Galadriel warned—"

But Gandalf cut through him sharply. "It does not matter _why_ it is what it is, Aragorn; it matters what lays here before us—"

But the edge to his voice fell away as he looked up to see Aragorn's strong face anxious and uncharacteristically weary, grey eyes bleary in a moon-pale face. He quietened and glanced round again for Gimli, who was returning now from wherever he had gone with several potted plants grasped tight to his chest in his broad-shouldered arms. The confused and scowling apprentice trailed behind.

"I will reach him and figure out the soul-hurt, Aragorn, and then I will guide him. And I will need you _both_ —" Gandalf nodded then to Aragorn and Ioreth in turn — "to treat him as best you know how, as quickly as you can, until I tell you to stop."

Aragorn looked for a moment as if he meant to ask more questions, but he was silenced when the wizard tapped his staff heavily on the flagstones, and a temper tinged with unearthly power flared momentarily, such that he looked less like an old man and more like a vessel for something far larger than himself. "Suppositions and explanation come later!" he said with force. "Here is a friend laid before us whose soul grapples even now to regain control of itself, and his body fights the efforts of both soul and flesh so that he suffers threat of death as intensely as any Man! The time for action has _passed_ , and the time for words is yet far affront, for this wood-elf needs urgently the touch of the Elder Days, which I am lucky enough, finally, to be allowed to give..."

Even before Gandalf had finished his speech, however, the healers had whirled into motion. Ioreth had motioned the girl over, and she was calling for more hot water and treatments from the boy. Aragorn had bowed his head in acquiescence to the wizard and then begun scrubbing his hands in a steaming bowl without a word. An assistant came round the corner, too, with a cart heavy and bumbling, a tray of herbs and clinking vials, more water, sloshing bowls—

"And Aragorn, you are to focus on his body—all this blood—" he gestured vaguely as he rolled up his sleeves, and he swept a hand across the elf's chest and heart, again, for emphasis. "Corralling an elven soul is an arduous thing, Elessar, and that—his mind—is my duty alone."

Aragorn gave Gandalf his word and set up a second bowl, where he preemptively crushed _athelas_ into its waters. Ioreth stood alongside him, unstoppering a bottle of antidote, and there was a clutch of rags tucked beneath her arm. The apprentice girl hovered behind—hugging a surgeon's kit and length of leather to her chest—and her eyes were wide as she watched Wizard and King and Lords of Distant Lands prepare to revive this Undying Creature from the books of her childhood.

Gandalf laid down his staff, adjusted his ring, and turned slightly to Éomer. "Stand at his feet? I expect he will fight me, until he listens."

Éomer moved to do as he asked—little though he understood it—and Gandalf then nodded to Gimli as the fresh scent of warm _athelas_ suffused the air, and it grew like a warm forest about them—

"Comfort him, if you will, my dear dwarf," Gandalf murmured to Gimli. "And help me, now, to wake him."

Gimli stepped forward at once, and he tucked one of the potted plants he had brought onto the table beside Legolas' head, and he blushed scarlet beneath his beard and braids. _I do not know if that will do anything—_ he had begun, but Gandalf cut him off and assured that the pulse of living things combined with the thoughtfulness of his dearest friend would surely do. And, so, the dwarf took up the elf's long and slender hand in his own, rough and thick, and he began again a prayer, under breath. As he spoke, he breathed in deeply of the _athelas_ , until the words became language that rolled heavy like boulders, cutting valleys through the forest that he felt rising, but could not see, about them…

Gandalf bent over the hitching chest, placed hands one to each side of Legolas' temples and, leaning forward, he closed his eyes—

The room stood frozen, then, as a tableau, suspended in the initial fall of an osprey dove fast into an updraft. Gandalf prodded gently and pushed, and there was an immediate genesis of a crescendo of surprise—it reverberated outward from somewhere far inside, and he tightened his hands on the elf's cheeks in preparation for the surge—

And then the moment of pregnant silence bucked and was broken, for the elf gasped on the table before them, and organized chaos was loosed around. Legolas' limbs suddenly tightened and arched, and the quaking from earlier assaulted him again… Éomer dropped himself flat on the shivering legs, and Gandalf grunted and cried out commandingly in Westron and quickly thereafter in Elvish:

" _Hearken, Thranduilion!"_

A breath.

Then, the wizard seemed to glow—warm, like a shuttered sun—though for Mithrandir the sun set on all but the soul pressed tight between his hands—

Another moment of silence prevailed as he bent even lower and the elf soundlessly quaked; the watchers stood with baited breath and the moment stretched on, toward eternity…

Then—in a burst of shattered tension—Legolas' body relaxed, his back uncurved and flattened, and his mouth fell open. Eyes flickered and brightened, blinked hard and then wide, and the darkest grey caught at Mithrandir's eyes before latching onto Gimli, though try as he might his lids were pulled down again, like stones dropped heavy in a shallow pool.

He fell utterly still, then, though words slipped from him and sagged—

"Aye, I am here, child," Mithrandir answered, and the words sifted gentle through the _athelas_ -lighted forest about them. "But you are not well, Legolas," he added with a grim smile.

Éomer—startled to see Legolas even mildly revived—pulled the anchor of himself away in surprise. Aragorn staggered and stepped forward, but Mithrandir pulled a hand from the elf's cheek and held it up swiftly to refuse him, for he was too concentrated on the heart of the wild elf fluttering stubbornly before him to take care for anything else—

"I am flown into pieces," Legolas murmured, and he tried valiantly to open his eyes again, but they only quivered beneath dark lashes and gently furrowed brows. "I have tried to get back; I am beating at—it will not let me in—"

"You fight too hard." And Mithrandir palmed the slick forehead and pressed lips to the mess of unruly hair at the elf's crown—"Do you trust me, Legolas?"

"Mithrandir," the elf murmured, heaving as he fought again to see, and then there was a noise of affirmation, and he continued: "As always."

He drifted for a moment beneath the wizard's hands.

"There is a war still to win," he whispered, and he wrenched his eyes open, and drifted them away from the wizard, off to his left. He sought the dwarf, who immediately clutched the hand tighter and pinched a sprig of the potted herb between his fingers, to encourage it to waken, to remind Legolas that he lived—"And after, _elvellon,_ places to travel _._ "

Gimli bowed his head then for, while he could not understand the words, he knew enough of Legolas to guess what they meant, and to know it was a promise. He clasped him at shoulder and wrist as the elf's eyes fought again toward Gandalf; the blood was bruising dark now, flickering and grown—

"I do not understand, Mithrandir."

And with that admission, the elf appeared again, to Mithrandir, small and young: The child the wizard had met years ago—usually well-hidden within the warrior he had become—had been cracked open and laid bare… That elf who had hung upside down from tree limbs—who had broken his arm at play and at war more times than he could count—who cheered his folk with his obnoxious disposition, whom Mithrandir himself had trained to drop the heavy _Rs_ and throaty _H_ sfrom his Common… It was that elven child who laid now grey and dying before him, tucked in a mirage of this strong and loyal fighter.

Mithrandir rubbed a thumb across the elf's cheek and instructed firmly: "Understanding comes later, sprite. Right now, you must simply let me in." And he pressed both hands again to the elf's face with renewed urgency. "You may want to fight this, Legolas, but you mustn't—just let me in, and then follow."

A moment of silence as Legolas listened and processed and breathed, and when his answer finally came it was not in words—Mithrandir simply felt him melt beneath him, yielding, and then he shuddered and gasped, and his eyes flew back, and shut—

Mithrandir motioned the healers forward with utmost urgency.

There was a mighty dance beginning inside them, stretched between Maia and wood-elf, through Arda and beyond—

"As we discussed," Mithrandir breathed to them quietly. "I can only hold him away from himself for so long." He sighed, "He flutters, and is already weary."

Ioreth pushed forward, and Aragorn swept in; Gimli clutched his friend harder, and Éomer stood at hand to do whatever he might.

And then, though the rest could not see it, a meeting progressed, called to order within the _athelas_ -grown forest of the cold healing room.

Legolas' soul was kindling, and he struggled, stretching his mind toward a glowing and pulsing light, a soul suspended in orange and blue—Mithrandir watched the elf reach toward this embodiment of Olórin; and, in his yearning, he pulled just far enough away from the disaster of his body that Mithrandir could slip himself between them, wedge himself more firmly into the shattered halves of the him, to keep away the soul that fought so hard to correct a failing body.

Elven souls were not meant to be pulled apart, but it sometimes happened, when things crept in to the cracks like grief and froze in the silent moments between, when the soul was pulled toward another horizon.

Legolas' had jumped for a moment and spun, and was severed, and when he returned to find his body aching and sickened, he had tried to slip back in like a ghost, had tried to weave through the boles of the trees that sheltered his body's eaves to ease back inside… He had threaded and shifted and snuck and scooped, but it would not let him in, and so he had pounded with fists. He beat at the windows and kicked at the doors; he had thrown his will at every part of the vessel he could touch, aimed all his energy and his drive at every hurt that he could see.

But he had fought from just outside the house, and it was natural for the body to repel him. For when elven souls are bound tight to their shells, the mending is natural and right and good. But a soul that sets upon itself from the outside is akin to a healer untrained who wreaks havoc on his patient, for there is an idea or a memory of what to do—there is the why and maybe the how—but there is none of the nuance. No light touch, no gentle patience—it is a blunt battle of blunt force to which neither are accustomed…

Outside of them, all about Mithrandir, was muted noise like a dive below water, until he heard a cry—loud as a scream—cut through to their core, from a distant window.

He looked up to see a gull settled on the ledge, and he startled, and felt Legolas quake, too, within—

Before Mithrandir could react, however, Éomer was shooing; Aragorn had turned with a scowl and goose-quill needle in hand; and Gimli had thrown the potted plant from its place at Legolas' head, toward that omen that haunted them even now—

It wailed and flapped as the clay shattered, and it tripped outside into the darkness, off and away into blackest night. It was forgotten as the work progressed, and Mithrandir settled, and breathed.

He pushed back through the elf's mind and burrowed further into the soul, until Legolas' startled quaking stilled, and he turned.

A door appeared before them then—hung heavy with ivy—and more trees leapt up all around as the _athelas_ was breathed and poured fast in the fractures of the devastated soul, rushing to fill it like water into wave-cracked fissures at the shore...

The elf pulled aside the ivy curtain and opened the door to Olórin, who brushed past and through. Legolas paused for a moment behind, but then he was tugged and he followed, and so, together, they stepped into a world.


	3. The Moments Between

The first step through the ivy curtain had Legolas disoriented and blinking. He sifted through the greens and yellows and browns that muddied his vision, and he felt Mithrandir at his elbow, tightly gripping. When he finally blinked away the light-cut gauze, he found himself in his own mind, but, also, _elsewhere_ —somewhere between himself and another place, between himself and, maybe, Olórin. (Legolas did not bother trying to understand _how_ he knew Mithrandir was not just Mithrandir, that he was also this other thing—this thing greater than his apparent vessel, a soul as old as time—and he certainly did not bother wondering how he knew Mithrandir's other name, for he was just a wood-elf from a long-besieged land, and, while he was young and inconsequential to many in this wide world, he was not so uneducated as to believe all things were within his comprehension...)

Looking about, he found they were surrounded by the safer, warmer woods of his younger adulthood, though they were quite removed and high above them, for they walked in a clouded canopy. Olórin held him fast—his blues and oranges blurred with the greens and yellows of Legolas' soul so they were both suffused in a colored haze. Far below them, at the base of the trees of his mind—or perhaps the base of the trees of the _athelas_ -forest, he could not really tell—there was a swirling mass of water, writhing and crashing against the boles of oak and beech, against the maples and the hemlocks. They crested white and crashed again and again; they slipped and rushed between the trunks; they carried summer leaves and autumn ones, torn bits of curled spring ferns, tiny floating pinecones tipped from winter trees into the whirling mess below… The source of the tide and its movement were invisible, for the forest and its flood stretched far as the eye could see.

"Perhaps we see now clearly the source of your soul's momentary flight," Olórin murmured, glancing down at the roiling water below them, and he began moving through the canopy, placing feet carefully on the haze around them, and he held Legolas' wrist firmly as he moved.

Legolas stared through the mist under his feet as they walked, and he saw the crashing waves between his steps as he followed. He could not hear the water, exactly, but he did smell the trees all about him. They smelled like the stark cold of winter, the warm breath of spring, the wet humidity of summer, the crispness of fall with its muted mould, all at the same time—it was wondrous and breathtaking and overwhelming. He breathed deeply and closed his eyes as he trailed Olórin's tugging hand; he let the trees' songs slip inside him, and—

But he was yanked out of himself suddenly and he opened his eyes to find hands on his face and Olórin looking down at him from above, much taller than Mithrandir was normally. And, strangely, they were now in a treehouse of his childhood! One that he had built with his friends, centuries and centuries and centuries ago, far up in a tree just a league from the gates of his father's halls…

Olórin slapped his cheeks softly as he began to drift into memory, and he gripped him at the chin—

"Legolas, we are already inside your soul. I cannot have you falling any deeper without me. Do _not_ chase the songs of the trees any farther than this old creature can assuredly pursue a woodelf, do you understand?"

Legolas nodded, and frowned, and he finally looked about the small, dilapidated structure with interest—

"We are in my mind?"

Olórin nodded, and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. Legolas tapped one finger at a short practice arrow protruding from the wall beside him at chest height—his name was carved in runes beside it, cut with a childish hand when he was much younger. He glanced fingers over the stubs of the ones just above and below his own, those that marked the heights of old friends, long grown. Looking past the arrows out the open side of the treehouse and to the forest about them, he finally peered down, and he could see that water still beat angrily against their tree, as if the whole forest were but an obstacle in the way of its flood.

Legolas turned away from the woods and back to Mithrandir, though he realized he was Olórin still, for the whole of the small structure was lit like a lightbox, glowing soft and warm, radiating out from the wizard who had known him since he was small…

"Where has all this water come from?" he finally asked, though he did not move any farther away from the edge of the platform, and his hand still pressed lightly against the arrow of his younger self.

"Do you really not know?"

Legolas shook his head.

Olórin looked at him for a long moment then, and finally leaned forward and patted the floor before him. "Come sit, sprite. We have some things we can talk about while we wait to take you back into yourself."

Legolas turned reluctantly away from the multi-seasoned wood stretched far and wide around them, away from the light-cut mists, the hazes of the colors he had always held dear, the traces of the people he loved, and the hint of Olórin that had latched onto him when they entered through his curtain…

He walked to Olórin and sat down, cross-legged, and he folded his hands in his lap like a pupil patiently awaiting his tutor. He started to say something to the wizard—to answer—but he was stopped by a sudden and unexpected burning in his chest, and he found himself bent forward and clutching. His world dissolved into white for a moment, and the treehouse flickered about him as if he were not quite there _—or as if the world were not?—_ though he felt the cold of the wooden boards underhand as he scrambled for anchorage. He heard nothing for a moment, but, then, there was a faint cry from far away— _was it faint because he was pinned underwater?—_ a command and then hushing, a distinctly Sindarin curse from a voice he had come to love—

He was being pulled in two!

But, suddenly, the white receded just enough for him to see, as if through a caul, _not_ the glowing dark of the treehouse but, rather, _Aragorn in a stone room in Minas Tirith!_ Aragorn bent over Legolas' own body, which was rolled onto its side as foaming pink and bright red was sucked and sluiced from his lungs, from between his ribs, to a bowl held just below the slab on which he lay. He lunged toward his body and, for a moment, he was back inside his body-self, and he fought and hit and struggled against his body's apparent surrender—he burned and burned and _burned_ , and he found himself coughing in that world far away, though he was aware suddenly of the treehouse, too, and it was silent around him, _silent_ —

Until he was forced fully back into his soul-self by Olórin, by hands gripping his shoulders and a mind forcing even farther into his than the fingers were already dug, and then there was a hook, a jerk, a _ripping_ , and the pain was suddenly gone and his chest was light again—almost normal—no longer liquid, no longer heavy and drowning, _drowning_ —

"Legolas, child," Olórin said firmly, and Legolas looked up with sharp eyes into the warm orange of him, the subtle blue, cool, yes, but richer than Éomer's knit, brighter than that shirt in which he had sought comfort only minutes ago, though it seemed ages ago now. "You must _stop_ heeding the call of your body—it is a fight you cannot win. It is unnatural, yes, and I know you are weary; I _know_ this is a tiring thing; but if I let you back now you will destroy yourself."

Legolas ran hands down his face and then leaned forward with a fist under his chin, staring across the small space at Olórin, but—in so doing—he abruptly realized they were no longer in the treehouse he had built with his friends as a child, at all…

Instead, they were now in the kitchen of his dearest friend's family home—Ithildim's—whose parents had taken him in and grown him for a time, after his own family shattered under the weight of grief when he was just barely of age... Here, instead of trees, there was the scent of freshly-baked bread and the flickering of a woodstove. He sat cross-legged on their kitchen table, and he stared across at Olórin, who leant against the counter beside the overly familiar washbasin.

Behind Olórin and beyond the windows—past the blue bottles Ithildim's mother collected and lined on the sills— it snowed. Yet, when he glanced to his right, there was a gentle spring rain, and he could see bobbing snowdrops and water-heavy violets lining the paths to the backdoor. The waves did not lap the house here, though he could see them from his seat on the table, out there, just barely, at the very edge of the horizon…

All around him were the colors of himself and the colors of Olórin, yet Olórin did not speak again, and so Legolas ran a hand over the creases of his pants as he considered it all quietly, pondering the bizarre change of location, the shift from fond childhood memory to this more intimate space, of vulnerability... He watched and waited for more of Olórin's words, but they did not come. There was only the crackling of a fire and the patter of rain to his right, and the light slash of ice as it hit the window across from him.

"So," Legolas finally said. "You said, earlier, that later was the time for understanding. Is now later? Is it time?"

"Are you _ready_ for such understanding?" Olórin countered.

Legolas watched him for another moment, and then glanced around the reassuring room for strength. "I am, I think. I do not like being confused, and—"

He paused for a moment, and then looked back to Olórin with steady eyes, a hand creeping toward the mild burning that had moved from chest to shoulder.

"And I trust you to stop the—the _understanding_ if it will harm me. Ever have I trusted you with things of importance."

Olórin nodded, and Legolas saw his face flicker momentarily into the more familiar visage of Mithrandir, before he was bright again and sparkling, and Legolas continued, pointedly, though he was not sure what drove him:

"And ever I have trusted you—amidst whatever it was you asked of us—to protect me enough that I might still serve my woods, when you were done. And so, still, do I trust you now, in _this_ knowing, and in _this_ fight..."

Olórin nodded, and he took a step toward him, toward the table on which he sat. They took up one another's hands—Maia and woodelf—and then Legolas felt himself pulled entirely away from his far-away body, away from his very present soul-self, until he was numb to the burning in his shoulder, numb to the scent of warm bread, numb to the rhythm of the rain around him—he was tumbling off the table, forward and inward, on and out and on…

* * *

Gimli cradled Legolas' head gently in his hands as Aragorn worked on the blood that had flooded—without warning—into one side of his friend's chest, just minutes before.

It had begun in a moment of calm—Legolas had been still and quiet, and Gandalf had stood still and quiet, too, at the elf's feet. Ioreth had been treating the poisoned wound in the upper arm after Éomer helped her administer a third dose of antidote, and Aragorn had been forcing an extraction of licorice in through a goose-quill needle at the elbow, completely composed and entirely calm.

Éomer had been the first to react, placing a hand on Legolas' upper chest as the bruise below his collar bone spread and then deepened from blue to darkest purple—blackwater under shadow—and then the chest had begun to heave and stutter, and Legolas had turned his head and begun to quietly cough. Aragorn had looked up from his work but finished the injection, and by the time he had removed the quill and bound the cut, Legolas was trembling all over, coughing harshly, head turned toward Gimli as he struggled, and then the blood had come—

It was not something Gimli would soon forget. He could still feel the itch of drying blood on his cheeks, even now.

Aragorn had acted quickly, however, and the elf's chest was quickly drained—something _else_ Gimli hoped never to see again—and then the coughing had ceased, but not before Legolas' body had gone stiff and trembling, and Gandalf had begun murmuring in a language Gimli did not know, gripping the elf tight and whispering emphatically…

But then Legolas had fallen still as he had been earlier, and the bleeding from between his ribs had stopped entirely; his next cough coming up dry and tired; and he fell as quiet as Gimli had ever known him, apart from the slight gasping of air that was currently their norm.

"Aragorn," Gimli said gruffly, as he readjusted his hold on Legolas' head—feeling tangles catching at the nape of his neck as he did so—and Aragorn wiped his hands on a rag tucked in a pocket of his apron. "What has happened?"

Aragorn answered distractedly, hardly bothering to look up as he responded. "The antidote is only now taking affect—he needed several doses as it has been in his body for so long, and being elf-kind..." He bent lower to gently pull the reed from the cut between the ribs, to place it on the stone table beside the elf without much attention to anything but the task at hand. "I knew the licorice root was a dangerous choice as he still bled, yet his heart could not go on with so little in his veins—without something to succor the pressure, at least—and licorice may also sustain a body's natural response to hurt, beyond the power of an elven soul, yet—"

He looked up at Gimli now and frowned, hand pressing the rag hard against the newly-made wound as he met Gimli's eyes.

"Yet, still, I did not expect _this_... It is a strong venom," he concluded quietly, "and unnatural."

He handed the bowl of Legolas' emptied blood to an apprentice standing nearby, and he pressed then a small fold of linen into the slit he had made.

There was no more bleeding; Legolas no longer coughed or quivered. Éomer helped the apprentice lad turn him again onto his back. Ioreth immediately moved back in and began work once more on the arrow wound—binding it tightly over her earlier care with linens, though not so tightly it would damage the tissue—and massaging gently around the shoulder and the forearm, before turning attention to the small injury below the elbow, to redo the stitches.

Aragorn stood back for a moment and watched the still shallow but now even breaths at his friend's chest. He ran a hand through his hair as he thought and glanced at the cart of tools behind him, though Gimli interrupted before he decided what he ought to do next—

"But why the tremors, Aragorn?" the dwarf asked. "And why has the bleeding stopped so thoroughly now, when it has been mere minutes since the last dose of antidote?"

Aragorn glanced down again to Legolas' body to where Gandalf had moved, hands wrapped round his ankles so he was less in the way but could still maintain their connection.

"I believe he fought himself away from Gandalf for a moment, back into his body," Aragorn said with a frown. "Though it has worked to his benefit, I think, in this particular moment. He was in himself just long enough to stop the bleeding in his chest—to repair the weak veins—but not long enough to notice the antidotes in his blood, to which his soul might have reacted unkindly, not recognizing it for what it was. He is not, after all, a healer..."

Aragorn trailed off and wiped his hands on a damp cloth, and then crossed to the cabinet, pulling out blankets and gesturing for an assistant as he did so, who immediately began layering the elf in the thick woolen blankets. Gimli moved his hand back up to Legolas' head where he wiped sweat back from brow into hair, and, when he looked up, the apprentice girl was lugging a bucket of smooth, warmed rocks through the side door.

"Verily, we were lucky, as was he," Aragorn finally continued. "Gandalf allowed him just enough time here for his will to save this shell—though I imagine that was entirely accidental, on Gandalf's part—and then he pulled him away, extraordinarily, before Legolas could do unintentional damage."

Gimli stared at Aragorn blankly, and then finally reasoned quietly: "Well, elves are strange creatures, and wood-elves, I suppose, more than most..."

Aragorn smiled vaguely, recognizing the tired line for what it was—a dwarven attempt at stoic and staid normalcy.

Aragorn used a rag to pick up a rock from the bucket the apprentice had sat at his feet. He wrapped it in a cut of cloth and then tucked it at Legolas' calves, and he did the same all the way up the left side of his body, situating the most at hips and waist and ribs, under his armpit and against his shoulders.

"We will not lose him then?" Gimli finally asked, and when Aragorn looked up, the dwarf would not meet his eyes, and he fiddled slightly with the blanket at Legolas' shoulders, as if straightening it.

Aragorn sighed, and settled the last rock on the left side, for Éomer had done the entirety of the right. "If we can keep him warm, keep his blood inside of him, and help his body in regaining _some_ sort of liquid, I expect Mithrandir should be able to bring him back into himself, fully, within an hour or two."

Gimli was nodding, but he had not stopped with his rearranging of the fabric. Ioreth had finished her ministrations and walked away to the corner, where she cleaned tools and organized medicines, before tending to the lesser hurt of the cut on the elf's leg, as his other needs allowed.

"And then what is left of the healing, once he is back," Aragorn continued softly, " _that_ is child's play to an elf, especially to one so used to healing as a soldier of Mirkwood... It is even possible he might be nominally well by tomorrow evening, as he seemed to us today, though weaker, undoubtedly, for the blood loss."

Gimli swallowed hard and met Aragorn's eyes steadily. He finally nodded, and Aragorn checked the pulse at Legolas' neck and wrist one more time before stepping away; he returned with another precisely-measured dose of licorice. He pulled aside the bandage he had tied about the cut, through which he had administered the earlier extract, and he slipped the goose-quill needle back in, squeezing the attached pouch slightly so it pushed forward and into Legolas' blood.

Aragorn pulled it out slowly, rebound the cut, and looked up at Gimli.

"All else we might do is dependent on Gandalf, my friend," Aragorn affirmed softly, and his fingers still kept gentle pressure at the crook of Legolas' elbow. "We shall turn him on his side and have him take some warm water to help with the loss of blood but, apart from that, it is dependent on him, and on Gandalf. It is up to his soul to come back to his body and regain its control—its position of dominance, I would guess—so he might take care of the bodily hurts that remain."

Gimli had finished with straightening the blanket and moved on to rolling an abandoned towel to cushion the elf's neck. He ran a hand absently across the dark bruising on Legolas' jaw, but then pulled away, and took a step back. He glanced down at Gandalf, who still clutched tightly at Legolas' ankles, and he frowned mightily.

Aragorn followed his gaze.

"I am curious, though," the dwarf finally said, "to know what goes on _there_."

Aragorn _hmm_ ed, picked up his tools, and dropped them into a bucket of warm water an assistant had left at his feet. He shrugged out of his apron and turned slightly to find Éomer beside him, hand outstretched and ready to take care of whatever various and sundry he might request.

Éomer smiled slightly, and Aragorn thanked him with a firm and grateful grasp of his shoulder, before handing over the dirtied apron.

Gandalf had not moved, and Legolas' face was slack still, and absent.

Aragorn supported him at the small of his back, Éomer held him at the shoulders, and Gimli cradled his neck. He was turned onto his side and one knee tucked up toward his chest; Gandalf shifted his hands to clutch at one ankle instead of two. Aragorn and Ioreth worked to help him take in the warm water, and then they covered him again softly, and they added newly warmed rocks. Stepping back, they surveyed their hurried but committed work.

Deep within the elf before them, however, and the wizard standing before them, too—right in this room but also far away in Mirkwood and in memories, in snippets of Valinor; long-lost times in Doriath and in Lindon—a story was still being weaved, for Legolas and Gandalf navigated much to understand the truth of this soul-sundering, and Mithrandir had decided, at last, that Legolas was not yet ready to bear it, and he would have to piece it together on his own once he was conscious, and better prepared—

They edged, therefore, closer and closer to returning to the dry, cold stone of the healing room, even as, one by one, the assistants left for other duties, and the apprentices turned to their beds. Ioreth eventually fell asleep leant against the wall, and Éomer ducked out just past midnight to attend his sister.

Gandalf stayed bent, motionless, over the woodelf's now well-blanketed feet.

Gimli and Aragorn stood either side of their friends—Aragorn with one hand clasped at Legolas' wrist, fingers clutched and pressing into the slowly-strengthening pulse—and they waited, and waited, and waited…

* * *

When Legolas next came into his soul-self—after the tumbling and the spinning that left him disoriented, again, and aching—he did not at first know where he was, or he realized, at least, that he had never actually _been_ there before, though some part of it felt carved into the back of his memories, perhaps from stories he had heard long ago.

They were in a thick stand of beech, within a wider oak forest.

Legolas watched as a dark-haired girl flashed suddenly into being, as if from thin air. She ran past him through the bright gold and green trees that stretched outward—trees the same color as those that dominated his mind—and this girl was chased by an older boy (a brother, perhaps?) dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and Legolas knew immediately—without knowing _how_ he knew it—that this was his mother's childhood home of Southern Mirkwood, and this _girl_ was his mother and the _boy_ his uncle, though he had died millennia before Legolas was even born, felled following Oropher at Dagorlad.

A moment later there was a call from behind, and Legolas turned to see a woman lean out the door of a humble cottage that had blended innocuously into the underbrush between two tall trees—she had the bright, dark, hazel eyes of his mother and the thick, unruly hair he himself was too familiar with; he found himself brushing unconsciously at the errant strands caught at his brow, even as he stood frozen and staring in this not-memory. Then there was a man, too—slender but well-muscled, hazelnut and sparkling with repressed joy—and he was dropping from the trees, taking off at pace after the children, and he disappeared with less than a rustle into a thicket of blackcurrant and bilberries. Was this the grandfather his mother had said he himself so took after, in build and in spirit— _her_ father, Alm? Somehow, he knew that it was, and so he knew, too, that the woman before must have been his grandmother, Dûnnaniel. Alm came back suddenly, then, ducking beneath a vine, one child dragging at each hand—they were all laughing.

Olórin stood still beside Legolas, holding loosely onto one of his hands.

"This is my mother's family, in better times, long ago in the Southern Woods," Legolas said quietly, and he looked up at the wizard. "But they are all gone from here, and you know I never knew them, none but my mother."

"You are right, and _none_ of their souls linger still in Arda," Olórin answered in return.

Legolas frowned.

"How have you—" But he was cut off by a firm grip at his wrist, and then they were tumbling again, out and away from that time and place that was not his own—

They came to a grinding stop—for just a minute, barely that—in a clearing in Northern Mirkwood, where the ground was thick with snow and ice about them. This memory _was_ entirely his. Before him stood his mother and himself, his younger sister and his brother and his father, a few of their folk—his tiny sister Piniriel was wrapped up in furs and in blankets; she almost drowned in them. Piniriel was lifted onto a horse in front of their mother—for this was the day the two of them were meant to leave for the Havens!—and Legolas had felt so helpless, then, so small; too young and voiceless to stop it… He did not want to watch this again, did not want to feel this yearning, for he had lost them _both_ ; weakened by the loss of his siblings, betrayed by the grief in his mother's soul… It _still_ burned his heart—

And then they were ripped away again, rushing even _farther_ away, by Olórin. This time it was the farthest from his own mind he imagined he would be able to go without some part of him being irreparably cut—thrown into the wind and tossed into the ether, left to wander for Ages on end—for this place was somewhere colder and more distant, farther away and more remote, yet hot as molten gold, and _burning_ —

There was suddenly a town and trees and smoke, the sound of elven swords, and then the back of a golden head in flight—there were shouts in a Sindarin he could barely catch, a smattering of pure Nandorin interspersed, too, in panic. There was a voice that sounded like his father's but firmer; a voice that sounded like his father, too, but _warmer_ ; and yet he could understand the accents of neither, though there _was_ burning and crackling, _screaming_ … That he recognized, _that_ he could tell—

And then—without tumbling this time, with just a blink and a jerk of his not-stomach—he was rolled without warning into a country whose edges were lapped by the Sea, a country he had never known but knew immediately upon sight... There were a few Noldor there on the shore, tall and grand, and many Sindarin who had fled that burning place of his father's folk; there were some Laiquendi like his father's mother (whom he had never met) weaving here and there, looking anchorless on this flat, sandy shore, this treeless place that rolled— _dropped_ —into water.

And then, beyond it all—above it all, around it all, suffusing it _all_ —was _the_ _Sea_.

The Sea, and its salt; the Sea, and its cloud and its waves; the Sea, all of it—all _around_ him—the _Sea_ , and its ever-present, persistent cry…

Legolas glanced about him as the scene was bathed golden, beaten brilliant by the newborn sun, so much a brighter gold than himself, as muted as he was by the wet of his forests. He sought out Mithrandir frantically and found Olórin standing calmly at his side, felt suddenly the somehow-tangible hand gripped firmly at his upper arm as he himself stared, limp and wide-eyed; as he himself felt his feet begin to lift and move without his own volition—for there was the cold scream of a gull somewhere above and far away—and he tore back and away from it all, and he panicked—

He finally wrenched his mouth from its silence, and cried himself: "Why do you show me this?"

He clung to Olórin where the grip at his bicep was strongest, to prevent himself from moving from the dune on which he stood, for his feet were drawn away from the land in a way that burned his heart and smote his spirit; he was burning and pulled in two, into _three_ —

"Mithrandir! I do not want to see this place!"

Olórin was quiet for a moment as Legolas' soul struggled valiantly, turned itself away from the Sea—

"Do you _still_ not know where all the water in your forest has come from, child?" he finally asked, in a deliberately patient voice. "What cut your soul from yourself as surely as knife to thread, that let the poison spread unnoticed throughout your body?"

Legolas stubbornly dug his feet into the earth and felt the sand give slightly beneath him, and he felt also a hot tear on his cheek; he turned his not-body toward the glowing mass of Olórin, for while he was fairly sure these wandering folk on this shore could not see him, he would not risk the shame— " _Please_ , Mithrandir. I cannot understand this. Will you not help me to understand?"

"I have told you; I will only help you with the understanding if it will _protect_ you," Olórin answered quietly, turning toward Legolas and taking his head now between his hands—in this in between place of their minds—just as Gandalf did beyond them and above and far away, with the Legolas _there_ (hands pressed into cheeks, brow pressed to brow, whispers steady and quiet but entirely unintelligible to their mortal onlookers)—

"If after all _this_ ," Olórin continued, gesturing around them to the Sea, to Legolas' relatives and distant kin, to the shore, "you do not yet understand, it seems to me that you are simply not _ready_ to understand it."

Legolas held in a sigh.

"There is no shame in this, Legolas. You have a lifetime ahead of you to figure it out, and I shall help you for a time, if, that is, we are to see the other side of this war... And, even if we do _not_ see it, you will find your way to its truth, regardless. It is an inevitability for you."

"But we have seen people here I have never known," Legolas countered quickly. "It is impossible—there are people who are dead and gone, or have taken to the Sea. There was my mother and my uncle, my grandfathers and my—"

"Hush, sprite," Olórin said quietly, and Legolas looked up one final time into the glowing blues and oranges, into the water and the sunset and the _fire_ of Olórin, and it was the last time he would see him that way for years upon _years_ upon seemingly endless years— "Your soul is too weary for such thoughts right now, and we will need your spirit with us—kindled, whole and hale!—moving forward. We have a war to win, or did you forget?"

Legolas managed a smile.

Olórin continued, "Are you ready, then, to return to yourself, Legolas, and to that elf-friend of yours? He is anxious."

Legolas started. "May I? Is it time?"

"I think we have given Aragorn enough of a stretch to do his work," he answered and, while Legolas did not see it, he felt Olórin-Mithrandir raise an eyebrow as he next spoke. "And, well, do you promise not to beat at the windows and doors of yourself to get back in if I take you there now?"

Legolas nodded immediately.

"All right, then," Olórin answered, a note of amusement in his voice. "I will weave you in gently, and you must follow me. There may be times when I ask for you to fight, but you mustn't do anything at all, unless I say so."

Legolas nodded again, and Olórin's light refracted like a prism about them as he turned.

Legolas took one last look at this faraway world. He saw the other grandmother he had never known, Gôlnamir, knelt at the seaside in tears, Oropher cradling her tightly—there was a small ship, far out and leaving, blending into the horizon. Some distance behind them, a tall elf, old, with grey eyes darker than even his stood beside his _own_ father (who seemed so very young, bright and still intensely burning), and they spoke together quietly as Thranduil shrugged out of his cloak, brown-painted-grey with the remnants of their ashed home—

But then Olórin's hands were tight again at his, painfully so. In a whirl of robes and of prismatic light—in a mist of green and blue and orange and gold—the shore around them dissolved, and they went.


End file.
